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On those rare occasions when you come across a technology that blows the doors off its predecessors, you have to take an in-depth look. The latest-generation wireless routers from Linksys and Netgear give performance that beats anything we've seen beforeand not just by a little bit.

The Airgo Networks True MIMO Gen3 chipset is responsible. I tested two wireless routers based on it, and the results were amazing. Real-world TCP throughput for both the Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router with SRX400 and the Netgear RangeMax 240 hit over 103 Mbps(!) with a 10-foot separation between the access point and the PCs (laptops, in this case).

Suddenly your 100-Mbps wired Fast Ethernet network has become the bottleneck for local traffic. Granted, this blazing performance drops off with distance, but at 60 feet, both of the routers we tested still managed throughput close to that of Fast Ethernet. And even at 160 feet, we got bet-ter than 20 Mbpsa significant improvement over the roughly 10-Mbps max of the fastest previous technology.